If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Pussy Riot disowns Nadia and Maria!

By Stephen Morgan in Brussels

Pussy Riot have disowned their two
formerly imprisoned comrades, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda (Nadia)
Tolokonnikova in an open letter which makes it clear that the group can no
longer be associated with them and no longer considers them to be members.

While congratulating them on their new
work on prisoners' rights, the 6 members of the original group, Garadja, Fara,
Shaiba, Cat, Seraphima and Schumacher, issued a public statement criticizing
Maria and Nadia for having forsaken the "aspirations and ideals of our
group" and asking that the two should no longer be referred to as members
of Pussy Riot. The split appears to be both over ideology and tactics.

In the statement the groups says that
Nadia and Maria are no longer pursuing the band's original aims of “feminism,
separatist resistance, fight against authoritarianism and personality cult, all
of which,” they add, “was the cause for their unjust punishment." Pussy
Riot added that the remaining members are still committed to a "leftist
anti-capitalist ideology" and criticize their former comrades for having
become "institutionalised advocates of prisoners' rights."

I must say I wholeheartedly agree with
what the band is saying. As someone who has continuously campaigned for their
release over the last 16 months, the steps Nadia and Maria have taken and some
of the political comments they have made, have been disheartening and downright
disturbing.

Of course, I wouldn't expect them to
immediately repeat an action like the Cathedral protest and get themselves sent
back to prison, but I did hope that they would stay involved in the same
radical politics they espoused before. Of course, their new work over prisoner
rights is very important, but one wonders if this couldn't have been combined
with more general activities on injustice over LGBTQI rights, womens issues,
the rampant racism which infects Russia and the growing attacks on working
class people, as a result of the deepening crisis of Russian capitalism.

That isn't to say that Nadia and Maria
aren't responding to such things in interviews, but their orientation no longer
seems to be inspired by their previously aggressive and rebellious opposition
to all aspects of Russia's reactionary culture and mores. Reforming the prison
system is great, but what happened to revolution?

My first misgivings about the direction
they were taking arose when they issued a statement saying they were prepared
to cooperate on a practical and “ideological” level with the recently released
billionaire oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky - once the richest man in Russia and
the virtual Don of the Mafia capitalists who plundered the country's assets to
make fortunes from the suffering of ordinary people.

Apparently they justified this by saying
the issue of prisoners' rights transcended questions of class. Unfortunately,
the majority of prisoners in Russia come from the most downtrodden layers of
the working class who have been forced into crime by a capitalist system which
cannot meet their basic needs. Moreover, in general, the courts always act in
the interests of the ruling class in any society. And, unlike members of the
ruling elite and their children, ordinary people get far harsher sentences and
have no chance of influencing or bribing the courts into annulling any of their
convictions.

It is the likes of Khodorkovsky who are
ultimately responsible for the imprisonment of so many people. His own
imprisonment was a question of class, in as much that it resulted from a
struggle within the ruling class itself over which group of exploiters should
have the power to enrich themselves most.

It is indeed sad to see these once
balaclavered revolutionaries reduced to "institutionalised advocates” as
Pussy Riot calls them. Instead of the clandestine photos of once proud
street-fighters, we now see pictures of them made-up like models, promoting
designer clothes and acting like globe-trotting, celebrities bathing in the
limelight of Hollywood-style stardom.

One now has to even ask oneself, did
Putin win? Criticism of prison conditions is a crucial issue, but, on its own,
it isn't something which Putin is going to loose sleep over. Perhaps, he even
gave a sigh of relief, when the people, who could do more than any others in
the international spotlight to expose the rottenness of his regime, seem to
have taken their eyes off the gun-sights.

When the third member of the original
trio, Yekaterina Samutsevich, was released early during the trial, many unjust
insinuations of collaboration were circulated. But at least Katie remained firm
in her convictions and used every opportunity to radically attack Putin's
system as a whole and, indeed, risked further imprisonment for it while on
probation.

Unfortunately, Pussy Riot says that Nadia
and Maria “have refused any contact with us.” Hopefully, there is more
confusion and lack of communication involved in all this than is presently
being reported. At a press conference yesterday, Nadia and Maria said they
would perform again, but exactly what they meant by this wasn't clear.

Nadia once described their trial as “a
trial of the entire political system of the Russian Federation,” while Maria
described prison as “just Russia in miniature.” I think most people would like
to see them return to the big picture. At the same, I'm sure that many of us
would also like to congratulate the other members of Pussy Riot for standing up
and defending the original ideals and aims of the group. Long Live Pussy Riot!